In OCR, how should I deal with the warped text on the sides of oval objects?
There are many papers on this but the following is a good start:

How to unwrap wine labels programmatically.  The author includes source code in Python.


You mentioned you do not want to do a panoramic view but that has more than one meaning.  If I assume you mean you do not want to rotate the can while taking multiple photos, or you don't want to take multiple photos from different angles, you could try a pericentric lens.  This would require some image processing to do the unwrapping.  More resolution is needed as the wrapping is much more severe.  The advantage though is that you will have a single image of the full cylindrical surface and won't miss any features or text.